Free Rules of the Hunt by Victor O'Reilly

Squeezed in between them were OLs
— office ladies — the catchall title given to women office workers.   Some OLs might have university degrees and
other excellent qualifications, but even so, the serious work belonged to the
men.   An OL's job was to make the tea and
dot he chores and bow prettily and get married.   An OL was a second-class citizen.
    Adachi thought
of himself as moderately progressive, but he admitted to himself that he had
more or less accepted the status quo until he had met Chifune.   Now he found himself looking at OLs and other
Japanese women with renewed interest.   If
Chifune was representative of the true nature of Japanese womanhood,
Japan
was in
for some interesting times.
    He slipped his
folded copy of the Asahi Shibumi out
of his pocket and scanned the news.   There was another bribery scandal in the Diet, the Japanese Parliament,
and the Americans were getting upset about the trade balance.
    Nothing ever
changed.   He refolded the paper with some
skill — it was an art form like origami to do such a thing in a subway car
during rush hour, but you got good with practice — and checked the stock
market.   Nothing had changed there,
either.   The Nikkei was still going
up.   Day after day, that was all it
did.   Half of
Japan
seemed to be buying
shares.   Property values were going
insane.   Adachi was glad he had been a
paratrooper.   There was nothing like
jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft to remind you that what goes up must
come down.   He invested, but cautiously.
    The train
swayed and Adachi looked up.   Several
feet away, a young and rather pretty OL was looking his way, an expression of
subdued distress on her face.   Then she
looked directly at him, a silent cry for help in her eyes.   The carriage was jammed.   Pressed up directly behind her was a
round-faced middle-aged sarariman ,
his face expressionless.
    The practice
was all too common.   A man would press up
against a woman in a crowded subway and grope her or otherwise excite himself
sexually, confident that the woman would not complain.   A Western woman would tear herself away from
her assailant or otherwise protest.   Japanese women were taught to be submissive.   Other travelers, packed together but isolated
in their own worlds, would not interfere.
    Adachi
sighed.   Chifune would be the death of
him.   He squeezed toward the beleaguered
OL until he stood beside her, then smiled at the sarariman .   The man smiled back uncertainly.   Adachi reached out and put his hand in a
friendly manner on his shoulder and squeezed.   He thought he had the place about right.   The sarariman 's face glazed
over with pain and he went very white, and at the next station shot from the
train as if rocket-propelled.
    The girl
looked at Adachi uncertainly.   He had
helped her, but this was not usual behavior.   She was not sure what was coming next.   Adachi winked at her and she blushed.   He could not think of what else to do, and then he remembered that he
had a bunch of these idiotic MPD public relation cards in his pocket.   The cards featured the MPD mascot, a mouse
called ‘Peopo,’ and promoted the emergency service 110 number and the name,
rank, and telephone number of the officer concerned.   It was the kind of thing you gave to a
citizen and not to a yakuza , if you
did not want to be laughed at.   The girl
looked reassured and gave a little bow of thanks.   Adachi's station came up and he smiled
briefly and left.

     
    *           *           *           *           *

     
    Adachi's team
worked in a large open office on the sixth floor.
    The layout was
designed so that everybody could see what everybody else was doing.   It was not ideal for concentrated individual
work, but it was excellent for supervising and integrating the group.
    There were
thirty detectives, including the superintendent himself, in Adachi's
department.   The layout in this